I have done some research and found you can run Linux on a xbox360. How is it done? Well some of you might remember the old softmod for the xbox using splintercell and a special savegave. In the game KingKong they found a backdoor / flaw in the game's coding. Some hackers made a patch for the game so you can run Linux. The only problem is the DVD drive. Well before they found this little Linux idea some one found a way to flash the DVD drive with a hacked firmware that skips the check for the special key in the XEX files. Meaning you can play backups.

Well the DVD drive in the 360 is a SATA device. To flash it you need a PC with a SATA controller or a add-in card (nonRAID). Also you need the trusty old floppy drive with every modders favorite OS, DOS!

Sadly this ran to a halt. I found there are two types of the DVD drive that are commonly used. MS25 and MS28. The MS25 can be easily modded. The MS28 has a antiflash option. I have the MS28. Theres hope though. A. open up the DVD drive and remove a resistor and add a switch in it place (the VCC mod). B. buy a SATA add-in card that uses a VIA chipset. For some reason the VIA chipsets are not affected by the antiflash protocol that is in the firmware's software. A friend of mine has a extra card for me to use. I'll have it next week. Also I have KingKong on order, on 5 bucks off ebay.

compared to windows, DOS ROOOOOCKS!!!!!!!!!!!! I tried Vista for the first time today, it's so counter-intuitive, I'd rather deal with a command-line interface than that vista cr@p any day of the week! Can't wait till leopard launches! I'll get my first pro mac (a 15" macbook pro) on launch!

The reason why DOS is preferred over windows for flashing hardware is because in DOS all you have running is the kernel and the flasher. Windows has all sorts of files loaded into memory and if something goes wrong like say a conflicting chunk of software can interfere with the flasher and end up inside the EPROM instead of the ROM/BIOS/Firmware you wanted. I always flash my hardware in DOS. I tried it once before in windows and it crashed the BIOS when I was updating it. I was lucky though since my motherboard at the time had dual BIOS. Just rebooted and the second BIOS took over and went into the BIOS restore option.

Anyway, I find it neat how something old can still be very useful. I thought I had to locate some special drivers for my SATA to work for the flasher in DOS. DOS it self didn't have support but the flasher is made to scan the BIOS for IRQ and I/O that most SATA controllers use.

Funnything is I still have a DOS box that is used for classic games and it's even on my network. For a while there I use to slipstream drivers for newer 10/100 nics to work in MS network client for DOS for people that wanted to setup their systems to do a network install of Windows.

I got the SATA card today and I started right away. At first I got mad, the SATA card wouldn't work. I pulled out the card and noticed gunk on the contacts. After whipping it down with some contact cleaner I popped it in and turned on the computer. Windows finally saw the fricken card. I made a bootable flash drive with all of the software needed to flash the DVD drive. Took about a hour to figure it all out. I got it up and running! I even made a video when I was testing the drive.

I don't want to sound stupid, but can you just borrow or purchase a different DVD drive for your 360 in the meantime? Is it keyed to your XBOX somehow? At this point, you may want to try that to save your sanity. It could just be the DVD drive itself or possibly the DVD's that you are trying to use.

I have never modded a 360 but I've modded 1.0-1.6b XBOX's, so I know what you're going through.

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